We spoke voraciously of international politics. John’s appetite for my fairy tales of the troubles at home seemed insatiable. I laid on my Irishness thick and creamy. John would listen for long periods, then suddenly attack with a barrage of questions. I had to struggle to answer them. Our imprisonment had given us a capacity to think deeply and comprehensively. In the nothingness and those excruciating hours of mind-wrecking isolation from which we had both to climb and fall back and climb again, we had each brought with us, unknowingly, an intellect honed and sharpened. These profound meditations often degenerated into an exchange of foul-mouthed banter. ‘That’s the problem with marley mouths like you. You write about news you have no understanding of.’ John giggled. ‘Marley mouth?’ he asked. ‘Yes, you talk like you were born with marleys in your mouth … I don’t know how you ever got the silver spoon in.’
‘Marleys?’ he asked again, his laughter rising; ‘What in the name of fuck are you talking about, you ridiculous Irish aborigine.’ ‘Marleys, you brain-dead piece of shit, are little coloured glass balls that children play with … I would have thought that a boarding school pimp like yourself would know all about playing with balls,’ I retorted. John’s laughter was feverish. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said in the most precise and mannered English, ‘you mean marbles. It always amazes me that the race of apes from which you descended should ever have acquired the basic rudiments of language. As for my manner of speech, your own diction is unfathomable. It is only matched by your audacity, you maggot-faced, pea-brained piece of pus.’
Both of us were now in hysterics. The rich elaborations that we slung at one another endlessly with childish competitiveness intoxicated us. It was heady, monstrous and foul. But it was gloriously imaginative and unfettered. We hurled this abuse with such pretended vehemence and at other times with such calm perverse eloquence that the force of it and the laughter pushed back the crushing agony of the
tiny space. ‘John-boy, if I get out of here before you I am going to go and see your mum. I’m going to tell her the truth.’ I paused. John looked, screwing up one eye as if to say; what are you at, Keenan? I continued ‘I’m going to tell her that your language is appalling. You swear like a trooper and your imagination belongs in a dung-heap of a camel overcome with diarrhoea.’ John answered ‘My dear fellow, if you do I’ll tell you what she will say.’ He paused.’ “You are a fucking lying Irish bastard, now buggah off,” that’s what she will say,’ he concluded. And again we were off laughing uncontrollably and the laughter of each affecting the other. The way the laughing sailor dolls in fair grounds and fun-houses have everyone who pays to hear them laughing uncontrollably along with them.
In a moment of quiet John would ask ‘Do you think God minds us swearing?’ The innocence of the question stunned me. ‘I don’t think so,’ I slowly answered. ‘Anyway if he does it’s too late for both of us, especially you. The stokers in hell will be working overtime awaiting your arrival.’ John would not be knocked down, he replied calmly ‘Well in that case they won’t find an oven big enough to get your fat arse through.’ His smiled widened with that remark. I came back at him. ‘I’m convinced that the noise and smell of your farts will ensure your own arse is permanently employed as hell’s own bellows.’ The train of humour and abuse was steaming along again and we rollercoasted recklessly with it.
When we were not butting one another with vicious humour we talked about pleasant moments in our lives. John seemed to be quite a charmer and to have had his fair share of female companionship. I was less fortunate or perhaps had chosen not to pursue commitment too enthusiastically, always having my eye fixed on another horizon or another country. Travel fascinated me and I had done much in the years prior to coming to Lebanon. Even in this talk of travel we would revert to descriptions of the women we had met or simply admired in the different countries we had visited.
Strangely enough there was never any discussion of intimate moments with female friends. We felt no need to talk about the physical side of relationships. We preferred to talk about the comical situations. I often wondered why our relationships had ended in the way they had. Perhaps we had both learned much about ourselves in that long period of isolation, delving back into our history and stopping abruptly to confront the full meaning of a specific incident. , In such confrontations we had seen and perceived and understood so
much more of what had been happening, what people were thinking and how they were feeling. It seemed as I thought back over the poignancy and vividness of these memories that I had been more blind then than I was now even in the darkness with this piece of cloth perpetually confining my eyes. I turned to John one evening before going to sleep and said ‘John-boy, I’m really glad you told me about all those girlfriends because I’ve been running out of women to think about and now I’ve got all yours to sleep with for the next week or two.’ Sardonically he answered ‘You’d be so lucky, they wouldn’t have you. These women like class and I’m it.’ We both laughed and lay back in the darkness understanding perhaps as we hadn’t before our need for love.
For many days we talked of how we’d like—one day, if fate reversed itself-to become fathers. I spoke again of my daydream of birth, during my time in solitary. John didn’t comment but only listened, intensely fascinated. We talked of our dreams, trying to understand the significance of what we remembered from them. There were nights that we both remembered, in the early hours, when one of us would hear the other moaning deeply and fearfully. A moaning that sometimes lasted for fifteen minutes. The listener lay wondering at the agony of it. I had my own share of these horrors and would sometimes even in my sleep hear myself moan. It seems that in nightmares we cannot cry nor scream. It’s smothered in the dream or in the nightmare itself and it will not come out. On those occasions as I lay shivering with a fear bred in my sleeping mind I would feel a hand gently on my shoulder, shaking me tenderly and whispering ‘Brian, Brian wake up, wake up.’ I would wake and know that I had been dreaming. John would simply say ‘Are you okay, you seemed to be having it rough there.’ I would answer, still half asleep, ‘Yeah, I’m okay. It was fucking rough I can tell you.’ We would both lie back in silence, and perhaps talk of the last remnants of the images and the horrors that had so disturbed us, and then fall back into sleep.
But this madness was not confined to the night or to the sleeping mind. We both lived at such an intensity of mind and of emotion that we knew an exhaustion beyond a physical one. The conscious mind needed rest from the way it was being driven and abused. It needed rest from our separate attempts to contain it with humour or amuse it with storytelling or with that kind of confessional sharing that was so much a part of our bonding together.
Many times we sat staring at the wall or tried to sleep during the
day. On one of these occasions while I was dozing after a lunch of rice and spinach, I felt John shake me, not in the gentle manner he would use if I were dreaming but this time urgently. ‘I’m not sleeping, John what is it?’ There was silence for a moment and then he answered ‘I’m going mad,’ and again ‘I’m going mad … I’m really, really going mad … what am I going to do?’ I knew that this was not a time for humorous rebuttal. I had known these moments, as I’m sure John had before, but in isolation you understand them differently and have to deal with them alone. I sat up and looked at him. He looked pale. I hadn’t noticed until now the black circles under his eyes. This thing had been coming at him for days.
He looked at me. ‘Talk to me, tell me something, tell me what to do?’ he pleaded in desperation, the words faltering from him. ‘You’re not going mad, John,’ I said. ‘It’s one of those bad patches that come at us.’ ‘But I can’t get rid of this, my mind is breaking up,’ he said. I felt in the air the desperation that he was experiencing, as I desperately sought to find an answer for him. ‘Listen to me, John,’ I said firmly.
‘Listen?’ He looked at me. ‘Try to imagine something.’ He stared at me intently. ‘I’ll tell you what I d
o,’ I said: ‘I get these moments as well, and I try to imagine a room, any kind of room anywhere. I think of two things in that room and then I try to build a story around why those things are there. What happened in that room?… Where did these things come from? … Who lived in there? You’ve got to build a story in your head.’ I saw him look at me now more intensely. ‘I’ll tell you what. Here’s a room. There’s a table in it, a few chairs, a fireplace filled with ashes. There’s the peelings of an orange. There’s a pair of shoes on the floor … There’re no laces in the shoes.’ I looked again at him, his intensity was driving into me. ‘Come on, John … see that room in your head. Now I’ve told you two things. I’ve put two things in that room … You put two more in … Put them in that room. Think of why those things are there? Why did they get there? Who put them there? What happened in that room? Build a story around it, John. Create a room that you can go into so that you understand why everything is as it is in that room. Search out in your mind all the reasons why that room is the way it is. But first just pick two things completely disassociated from one another and put them in this room. Tell them to me now. What are those things?’
His staring face changed; I felt he was becoming intrigued by my suggestion. ‘Come on, John, I’ve done it lots of times … You’ll find it’s fascinating and you’ll find it’s interesting and it will bring you down. Think of it, think of that room, think of those things. There’s an orange peel. There’re shoes with no laces in them … Put two more things in that room, any two things. Go into that room and find out what’s happening in there … Who’s been there … What did they do? … It helps, John, it helps.’ He looked again at me, very softly and very slowly he said ‘You and your fucking rooms.’ Forcing a gentle laugh I replied ‘Rooms are what we know lots about.’ I lay back and John continued sitting against the wall. I lay awake and wondered would he do as I had suggested or would he sit in silence trying to crush out the insanity. The moment passed.
I slept and awoke early. John was deep in sleep and I was grateful. I felt the huge relief that a parent might feel when their child has passed through some crisis of fever. But the dread of what had happened hung about. What if we were both to lose control, or if one of us was to let go and fall permanently down into that pit of mindlessness, could the other bear it? But what was the alternative? To be separated would be worse. No, there was no alternative. We were responsible for each other; no matter what happened we must not be separated.
Our strength lay in one another. As I thought these things I looked at the little fan turning in the bottom of the door. Its blades were exposed. If things got too bad we could always ram a hand or foot into the blades. The guards would have to do something. I heard John wake, I kept my thoughts to myself.
‘How’s the raving lunatic?’ I asked. I saw the weariness in his eyes, but it was not the weariness of sleep. I felt guilty and tried to cover up my guilt and embarrassment with idle talk. ‘It gets very rough sometimes, the mind just goes galloping off, it either leaves you empty or it trails you helplessly after it.’ John looked up. ‘It’s been galloping around in circles for days until nothing made sense, everything was just a mess of everything else. Sometimes there was just nothing … How long do you think we are going to be here?’ he asked. ‘Until the man upstairs says your number is up.’ I could say no more. I knew John was only half listening. It was better in any case not to speak. To cover up and pretend that these things are insignificant is an injustice and is selfish. Soon breakfast would come and we would be taken to the shower and maybe things would lighten up.
The food was ample but hardly nourishing. Breakfast was bread, tea, cheese and jam. Lunch was a mixture of rice and spinach or rice and peas and carrots. Occasionally we had a coarse stew. They gave us hard-boiled eggs frequently. Supper was always a repeat of breakfast.
Sometimes we would be given sandwiches brought in from a shop and with them some pastries. Such food was a delight. The sandwiches often contained meat or chicken heavily spiced and filled with hot chillies and pickles. The pastries were often cloyingly sweet and we could not eat them. We knew that lunch was always cooked by a woman living nearby and brought in to us. The food that we could not or would not eat we deposited in a plastic bag that was given us each day for rubbish.
We often noticed that food we handed back, such as hard-boiled eggs, was thrown into the guards’ rubbish. Our unclean hands had touched it and thus it was forbidden to the zealots that held us. Each time I saw this I was angry. To be considered unclean and untouchable was a humiliation I would not stand. This absolute judgement was without logic, reason, understanding or humanity, and devalued me beyond all comprehension. To concede to this was an admission of defeat. I hated the waste. I remembered what they had said to me in my first imprisonment when I had refused to eat and they simply shrugged their shoulders saying ‘There are many people hungry in Lebanon; if you do not eat, we do not care.’
As we sat in our cell passing those long hours, John and I often discussed the Lebanon we had got to know before we were taken captive. During my four months teaching at the university, I had been fortunate enough to travel around the country, usually going out with a colleague for dinner and driving up into the hills, or perhaps to Sidon. I had seen much of how the land had been devastated and was aware of the grinding poverty with which the people from the southern suburbs had to contend. Lebanon is a country of vast extremes, of great wealth set side by side with the most abject poverty. Its different religious groupings, each of them insisting on the absolute correctness of its own system of belief and way of life, had made impossible the kind of compromise and acceptance of each other’s traditions that could have more equitably distributed the country’s wealth. Lebanon is crippled by a kind of tribalism, its peoples afraid of one another though they live so close together in this tiny land mass.
I remembered talking to a Lebanese in a hotel one evening and asking him why it was that Lebanese who suffered collectively should choose to kill one another rather than come together and face their common enemy. I couldn’t understand the huge arbitrariness of the slaughter that continued between men who after all shared common political beliefs and aspirations. My friend answered in the curious way in which the Lebanese sum up all their problems, in one sentence.
He said ‘In Lebanon it is not who you kill, but how many.’
I told John a story of the Turkish villa in which I lived before being taken. It was set high off the ground and surrounded by its own gardens. Beside the entrance steps was a small Christian grotto. The Virgin stood angelic in her blue and white. At Easter-time I watched old women walk past and push lighted candles through the gate and rails that set the villa off from the street. They left them there, crossed themselves and prayed. I used to stand and look out of the villa at this.
I wanted to open the gate to let them walk through the garden and pray beside the object of their veneration, but I could not. I was living near the Green Line that divides Christian East from Muslim West Beirut. My self-interest prevented me from opening the gate for them. I felt deeply ashamed. Behind me lived poor Armenians and near them even more impoverished Shias who had been dispossessed of their homes in the south of Lebanon. Overnight they had become urban citizens. Their whole way of life and their traditions had been stolen from them, obliterated overnight by the gratuitous and monstrous slaughter of the Israeli invasion of 1982. The city was a refuge but it was also a place alien to them. They were literally strangers in their own land. The distance between the rural population and the city life of Lebanon is immense. You can drive for a half-hour out of the city and into the hill villages and feel that you have driven back generations. John told me stories of the wealthy Lebanese drug barons he had met while working as a journalist, and of their complete lack of interest in and apathy about Lebanon and its problems. Their wealth and their power set them apart and they were untouched by poverty and suffering.
It is always the case when a people feel them
selves so totally dispossessed, so unjustly condemned to a condition of absolute poverty that the anguish of it forces them to seek an escape. The need to escape becomes stronger as each community acknowledges its dispossession. Such acknowledgement always carries with it, hidden beneath the surface, a kind of shame and guilt, an admission of loss of identity, of full humanity, and that shame and guilt grows into anger.
When the anger can find no outlet, when there is no recourse within the social structure for redress of grievances, the anger turns inwards and festers. They cannot find value in themselves; they reject and loathe themselves. A man can then no longer surrender to such a
monstrous condition of life. He seeks power, power that will restore his dignity and his manhood; that will let him stand with other men and know himself to be their equal and restore him to the community of humanity. But so filled with anger is he that he must act to reclaim meaning and purpose. With one great leap he tries to exorcize his fury.
The man unresolved in himself chooses, as men have done throughout history, to take up arms against his sea of troubles. He carries his Kalashnikov on his arm, his handgun stuck in the waistband of his trousers, a belt of bullets slung around his shoulders. I had seen so many young men in Beirut thus attired, their weapons hanging from them and glistening in the sun. The guns were symbols of potency. The men were dressed as caricatures of Rambo. Many of them wore a headband tied and knotted at the side above the ear, just as the character in the movie had done. It is a curious paradox that this Rambo figure, this all-American hero, was the stereotype which these young Arab revolutionaries had adopted. They had taken on the cult figure of the Great Satan they so despised and who they claimed was responsible for all the evil in the world. Emulating Rambo they would reconquer the world and simultaneously rid themselves of that inadequacy which they could never admit.